Fascinating
artsy biopic on the influential Vienna-born genius
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29
April 1951), the youngest child in a family of eight,
where three of his brothers committed suicide. Wittgenstein died at age 66 in
Cambridge of prostrate cancer.

Ludwig studied under Bertrand Russell (Michael
Gough) at Cambridge and was professor there from 1939
until 1947.
The late great celebrated gay filmmaker Derek Jarman
("Jubilee"/"The Tempest"/"Caravaggio") shot this film while in
the late stages of AIDS, which affected greatly his
eyesight. Jarman bravely, stylishly and cleverly
captures the essence of the child prodigy Ludwig
Wittgenstein and his development as a philosopher (Clancy
Chassay as the young Ludwig, Karl Johnson as an adult). The eccentric
philosopher was Jewish; rumored to be a homosexual;
shared the same young lover of John Maynard Keynes
(John Quentin), a poor Cambridge
working-class student named Johnny (Kevin Collins); was filthy rich from his
father's inheritance but gave away his fortune to his
large family; and was a philosopher who was so
disdainful of philosophy that he said it's 'A sickness
of the mind.'

The playful, irreverent and
unconventional examination of Wittgenstein is a sincerely
delirious film that never apologizes for being so
smart, so gay and so shockingly on the mark in its
assessment of the often misunderstood philosopher. It
tells us of the soul-searching philosopher's interest
in the study of logic,
the philosophy
of mathematics,
the philosophy
of the mind,
and the philosophy
of language, and how his first book published at the
age of 32, in 1921, a 75-pagebook entitled Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, in which he foolishly thought he
had all the answers and discovered the absolute in
logic but later learned that true knowledge comes only
with doubt and ambiguity and spent the rest of his
life refuting what he wrote.

The argumentative Wittgenstein expounds to
his colleagues and pupils that to imagine a language
is to imagine a world, that knowing something implies
doubt, that there are no genuine philosophical
problems, that watching newsreels is like watching the
work of the pupils of Goebbels, that the limits of
language are the limits of the world, that if a lion
could talk we could not understand himbecause his world is so
different from ours and that the solution to the
riddle of life and time lies outside of life and time.

I personally found it was
gratifying to know that the great philosopher loved
the breezy musicals of Betty Hutton and
Carmen Miranda...and Westerns, low-brow films which
I also like.

The low-budget
sophisticated talk-fest film used the minimal amount
of props because of the lack of funds and was
innovative enough to play scenes against a black background to spare costs;
nevertheless, the film made by a blind director turns
out to be a colorful visual treat and the stage sets
are brilliantly conceived. It offers a series of
vignettes that depict a unique perspective on the
tortured-soul philosopher Wittgenstein, a disagreeable conflicted
man, ill-at-ease wherever he was, with a penchant for
trying to leave the confines of academia and wanting
desperately to be recognized as a member of the
working-class even though his demeanor remained
aristocratic and he never worked a day in his life as
a laborer.

Ludwig volunteered to fight
as a frontline Austrian soldier in the trenches during
World War I and ended up
as a POW in an Italian prison camp. The restless
philosopher visited Moscow, but was rejected by the
Russian communist authorities when he applied for a
job there as a manual laborer and was told Russia
has all the unskilled workers it needs. The
philosopher lived at times in solitude in Norway and
Ireland, reputedly as a repressed homosexual. He
tried unsuccessfully to teach philosophy in a
provincial elementary school in Austria, but was
rejected by the students because he was so strange.
The weirdly amusing pic further entertains us with
an uplifting hilarious Fellini-like gay fashion
show, as Ludwig's intellectual crowd in Cambridge
wear purple sports jackets, sport ostrich plumes in
their hats and wear such gay threads that might have
gotten them killed in some parts of homophobic
America. There's also the matter of the
fictionalized recurring appearances by a cheeky green-skinned
dwarf Martian (Nabil Shaban) to
debate philosophical theory
with Ludwig, which
provides some silly skits that irritated some critics
but I thought Jarman
wisely used them to back up Wittgenstein's famous
quote that 'If people
never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever
get done.' Kudos must also go out
to Jarman in the snappy theatrical way he executes
throughout a wonderfuldroll sense of humor,
something that might not be for all tastes but was
assuredly appealing to me.

I loved this wacky film
because it was so bold in its
philosophical pronouncements and that its perceived
flaws somehow even made it a better watch. A
confident Jarman supposedly threw away much of
writer Terry Eagleton's sensible
factual script to put on the screen his own vision of
how he perceived the philosopher, which I imagine is
far more of blast than that screenplay could have
been. Also impressive are the performances of the two
actors playing Ludwig: the feisty 12-year-old Clancy
Chassay as the young Ludwig acts as the film's chief
story teller and Karl Johnson, who
supposedly is a dead-ringer for Ludwig, acts as
the adult Ludwig.
Johnson tore into his role like a hungry barnyard dog
into a carcass.